Maryland High School Baseball Player of the Week: How Voting Works & How to Win

Private vs. public — the story the May 2026 ballot tells

Sixteen nominees. That's the number SI's Maryland editors put on the May 4, 2026 baseball ballot — a count matched by the Maryland softball poll and among the deepest the platform runs. And when you read the list carefully, what stands out is not one school or one region — it's the split.

Four of the 16 names come from MIAA private programs: Arian Vargas of Archbishop Spalding, Joey Coudon of John Carroll, Zane Krikstan of Gilman, and Andrew Kirk of Good Counsel. The remaining 12 are spread across MPSSAA public schools of wildly varying size — Wootton in Montgomery County (one of the state's larger suburban programs), Mardela on the Eastern Shore, and Northern Garrett up in Garrett County near the West Virginia border, hours from the Baltimore metro. On a baseball diamond these programs would never meet. On this ballot they compete for the same votes.

That structure is worth understanding before you build any campaign here. The private MIAA programs — Spalding, John Carroll, Gilman — carry tight, active alumni networks. Their athletic communities communicate in ways that public schools usually don't: booster infrastructure built around tuition-paying families, alumni groups that track spring sports year-round, parent networks that are used to coordinating for admissions, fundraising, and now fan votes. That is a real structural advantage on a six-hour-cap ballot where returning voters matter more than the largest raw headcount.

But public schools have answered that before. Huntingtown won the 2025 MPSSAA 2A football title in November. Their baseball program is listed here through Joe Laur. Atholton's Thomas MacKenzie appears alongside Dulaney's Matthew Rich — both solid MPSSAA programs with engaged communities. Whether a public or private program wins any given week comes down to who organizes, not who has the bigger name.

The cap, and what 16 nominees actually mean for the math

The confirmed voting rule here is once every six hours. Not unlimited — that's the football polls. The baseball poll, like all Maryland spring-sport polls on this SI platform, times out each vote and holds you to the six-hour interval. A committed supporter who votes from the moment the poll opens Sunday through the close the following Sunday contributes roughly 28 votes. That is the ceiling per person.

Now multiply by 16 nominees. In a 10-name field, votes concentrate faster. In a 16-name field, the first question is whether any single community pulls clear of the split or whether the week goes to whoever is least-diluted. The math works like this: if 200 people from one school cycle through the six-hour window consistently for seven days, they contribute roughly 5,600 votes total. But if those 200 supporters spread across two or three nominees from the same area — which can happen when a region has multiple nominees in the same week — those 5,600 votes become 2,000 per name and nobody wins.

This is why the community mapping matters. The poll doesn't reward the loudest school the night before Sunday's close. It rewards the school whose network returns, twice a day, for the entire week.

Who turns out in Maryland baseball, and from where

Maryland baseball's geography is spread across several regions rather than concentrated in one corridor. The May 2026 ballot stretched from Garrett County in the far west — Hunter Livengood of Northern Garrett, a program near Deep Creek Lake well over 100 miles from Annapolis — to the Eastern Shore (Nathan Feather of Mardela), to the Baltimore-Washington suburbs (Wootton, Atholton, Flowers, Catonsville, Randallstown, Dulaney, Poolesville), to Annapolis and Huntingtown, and to four private-school programs spread across the Baltimore metro.

That spread means there is no dominant text-chain geography. A Gilman family in Roland Park and a Mardela family on the Shore are not in the same community chat. They are entirely parallel mobilizations. What this tells any campaign organizer is simple: don't assume your local reach is being matched by a coordinated statewide rival. The ballot is genuinely geographically fragmented, and a tight private-school network in Baltimore can cycle its votes just as effectively as a large suburban school, without either one knowing what the other is doing.

The Eastern Shore and Western Maryland nominees — Mardela, Northern Garrett — are worth noting specifically. These are smaller programs with tight community footprints. On the field they rarely play Baltimore or Montgomery County schools. On the ballot they're in direct competition. And the six-hour cap is an equalizer: 150 people from Mardela voting consistently through Sunday night can match 150 people from Wootton doing the same thing, regardless of the enrollment gap between the two schools. That is the actual mechanic.

For broader context on Maryland weekly fan votes across other sports, see /usa/maryland/. The full national directory is at /usa/. How weekly fan-vote campaigns generally work is laid out in the how-to guide. If you want to extend your reach past the immediate school and booster network, vote support structured around the six-hour interval is covered there.